Which is not to say it wasn’t necessary, and even good. Clearly, bin Laden deserved to die — and the world is a safer place with him gone. But just because the man needed killing, doesn’t mean the hit that took him out didn’t bend or even break U.S. law. That’s the subject of my new piece for Politico.

The legality of the bin Laden hit is neither a pointless question nor a purely academic one. Our laws are meaningless if we don’t respect them. In a complex and dangerous world, a solid foundation of law helps ensure the peaceful coexistence of nations with ample reason to fear each other. In short, if we broke our laws in order to kill bin Laden, we risk the kind of behavior typical of a “rogue state.” And we all know how the world feels about rogue states.

In considering the legal case, some observers have focused on whether bin Laden was armed and fought his Navy SEAL assailants. But that’s confusing covert and military actions with cases of armed self-defense by cops and civilians here at home. The situations couldn’t be more different.

No, the legal issue actually boils down to one central question: Was the attack on Osama bin Laden truly a CIA-dominated covert action, or was it a mostly military one? The distinction matters because different U.S. legal codes apply to each category. Covert operations fall under Title 50. Military ops, under Title 10. In either case, the killing of the Al Qaeda chief presents legal problems.

That’s why the White House has carefully avoided both definitions, instead letting the raid fall into a fictional legal category that Jim Thomas, an expert in political-military relations from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, called “Title 60.” In other words, the sum of Titles 10 and 50.

The day after the raid, CIA Director Leon Panetta deftly described the attack both ways to PBS. After referring to the attack as a “Title 50 operation” commanded by him personally, Panetta quickly backtracked. “I have to tell you that the real commander was [Special Forces] Adm. [William] McRaven because he was on site, and he was actually in charge of the military operation that went in and got bin Laden.”

Moreover, the raid’s manpower was mostly or even entirely military, as were the secretive stealthy helicopters that transported the attackers. Also, the strongest potential legal cover for the attack could come from Congress’ 2001 authorization of the use of force against Al Qaeda — something that wouldn’t necessarily apply to a covert action.

This muddling on Panetta’s part is deliberate, according to Milt Bearden, a retired CIA station chief who headed agency operations in Pakistan in the 1980s. “That’s the ultimate duty of lawyering — as you’re looking at it and thinking about it, the box keeps turning itself inside out,” Bearden said.

In the best case, the killing of bin Laden exists in legal limbo. If the raid was definitively Title 10, it violated a slew of restrictions on the use of military force in a country that is not a formal enemy of the United States — this despite the Congressional authorization for using force against Al Qaeda. If it was Title 50, it could possibly be characterized as a political assassination, which is illegal under a 1976 Executive Order.

As lawyers and academics mull the legal implications of the Abbottabad raid, one expert cautions against taking too legalistic an approach to the problem. “You don’t want to argue against getting bin Laden,” said Karen Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University.

Instead, Greenberg said, we need to understand what laws we broke … so that we can fix the laws. “What does it mean to have a targeted-killing policy and what are the rules?” she asked rhetorically. With updated codes — perhaps including a real Title 60, we could pull off future high-profile hits on terrorist leaders without breaking our own laws.

“The ramifications of this,” Greenberg said, “need to be for the next bin Laden.”

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